


built on hope

by doublejoint



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon, Tatooine (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23550199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: When she has children--when she and Owen have children--she will allow them to dream a little more than she has been, even if they know it will lead to nowhere
Relationships: Owen Lars/Beru Whitesun
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	built on hope

**Author's Note:**

> 'pre-canon' as in 'before we meet beru in the movies, for the most part'

The first time Beru kisses him she’s been sipping on some homemade moonshine someone had stolen from their parents’ stock, halfway through her clay cup and very careful to place it on a flat surface so she doesn’t break it because, like everything else, she can’t afford to break it. Some of the other kids have puked or passed on their own containers, but Beru keeps going until the room is spinning and she feels brave and stupid. She puts the cup back down; her hands are empty and open. She could grab Owen Lars by the hands, by the ass if she really, really wanted to (and those are the kinds of thoughts she doesn’t dare think late at night in the tiny bedroom she shares with her older sister, like what the hair on Owen’s chest looks like and feels like, what it would taste like to kiss him).

“Hi,” she says, and she can feel her hair slipping out of its tight braid, but no matter.

“Hi,” says Owen, stretching out the syllable almost like he’s trying to tell her he’s drunker than she is, and then she makes her move.

The kiss is sloppy and wet, and Owen tastes like the moonshine washed back with blue milk, a little bit sharp and a little bit sweet.

* * *

Tatooine is not a place favorable to those who take risks. You bet on the podraces; you patch your machines up as best you can to get you through the season; you go no further than that. If you need an extra farmhand you make do until you make damn sure you can afford to take them on, and you carry a blaster but avoid anywhere the Tuskens could possibly ambush you. No one’s got enough luck to pilot their speeder drunk or jump into a nest of womp rats or wander off into the desert more than once, if even once, and they all know it. 

There are other places, foreign places, that exist only in whispers and rumors and HoloNet dramas, where risks are fun and worth taking, and Beru thinks that maybe kissing Owen is as close to that as she’ll ever get.

(He says his mother--stepmother, though that doesn’t feel quite right in his mouth she’s been a part of his family so long--had a son who’d won a podrace, but that can’t be true. Beru looks it up, and an Anakin Skywalker, a human, did win, and maybe Owen wasn’t lying, but she never asks Shmi and only when she does meet Anakin, stormy eyes and pure determination, does she finally really believe it all, because who else would take that risk than someone who would never last on Tatooine, whose risks had somehow paid off and gotten him off this damn rock and into an epic poem?) 

By most measures, it’s not really much of a risk. He’s the only child of a moisture farmer, she the third of another; her sister will inherit but she knows the trade, the switches for the breakers and the hum of the machinery, the things that have shaped her like the sand in the wind eroding her out of a canyon. They would have gotten married anyway, probably--or married people enough like each other that anyone looking from more than a few paces away wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. You aren’t supposed to have preferences like this, see beyond the categories you fall into and the cogs in the machine that you can push just to keep the whole planet revolving around the binary suns. It makes a difference to Beru, though; it makes a difference to Owen, the same way it did to Cliegg and Shmi, the same way Owen is not just a son who does them proud by doing his duty but a son who does them proud by being himself. 

Every child wants to believe they’re special. Beru’s mother always says that, dismissive through her teeth and lips, and Beru always wants to retort that it’s more than that. She knows she’s not special, not really; she’s just another farmer’s daughter; her teenage parties, stolen (no, grasped) kisses and cups of homemade booze are the way things were for her older siblings, for her parents, for generations before them. She’s lucky enough to be free with a family that could keep afloat even with three children to feed before they were old enough to work on the farm, and three children who survived. Any dreams she has are delusions—becoming a professional cheesemaker or a sharpshooter, living somewhere she can keep the generators on all night and not have to shut them off and pray to the higher powers that surely do not exist that they’ll all turn on without fail tomorrow.

But she still thinks about those dreams, late at night when she’s still getting used to the silence with the power out, when thinking particular thoughts about Owen Lars might be less dangerous.

When she has children--when she and Owen have children--she will allow them to dream a little more than she has been, even if they know it will lead to nowhere. She knows it, and it still makes it a little easier to space out waiting for the machines to finish their cycles, imagining herself in a room full of ripening cheese. 

If she’s had an opinion, one way or another, that Owen’s stepbrother would ever come back, it’s that in all likelihood he wouldn’t. He’d been shot by a politician, sent off to work on some mining planet with no way off, exploded in a faulty starship, captured by slavers somewhere else, not at liberty to return--or no love for the place, and the desire to see his mother outweighed by understandable fears that she would no longer be there. And yet, Shim’s faith (not blind, merely absolute) that he would, that she’d see him again, had kept Beru’s own hope alive. Hope, for a person she’d never met, but who meant something to her because he meant so much to Shmi, so much that her first thought when she’d found out Shim had disappeared had been--what are we going to tell Anakin, when he comes back?

(She clutches Owen’s hand, and he whispers an acknowledgement, that he also has no idea how to say it, and in the moment Beru feels some mix of terror and anger--why had this happened to someone like Cliegg?--and inevitability--it always happens to you, or someone you know, the danger never too far off--and yet, still, hope.

Anakin comes too late, but he comes as if he’d heard his mother’s disappearance from the opposite end of the galaxy, and from what his companion says, he had. It’s hard not to believe after that.)

* * *

“Luke’s not meant to be a farmer,” she says, falling into the rhythm of the argument she’s had with Owen at least once a week since he’d turned ten.

“He’s a good shot,” says Owen. “Good with machines.”

They don’t have any other children, but they could always sell to someone with enough capital--go where and do what then? Just because it’s always been that way doesn’t mean it should continue until the suns burn out; just because they’d never had a shot with their own dreams doesn’t mean Luke shouldn’t get that.

“He’s a good pilot,” says Beru. 

“I know,” says Owen.

The silence stretches between them, like they’re kids on the opposite sides of a room with liquor and fire in their veins. Beru still has her dreams, but she can’t afford too many more risks. She turns her hand up on the table, and a few seconds later Owen takes it. His hand is rough in hers; she knows the feeling of it by heart.


End file.
